Marce Cameron, Sydney
Without any public consultation, Sydney City Council (SCC) voted on August 1 to allow a council sub-committee to consider a development application that would grant "consent to enable the lodgement of a development application by Nationwide News Pty Ltd for the distribution of the newspaper known as MX" on city streets.
Nationwide News is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Limited. It is offering the council $362,000 per year, plus $110 a day, for street distribution rights for MX, a free, daily tabloid.
All but three councillors — the Greens' Chris Harris and Labor's Verity Firth and Tony Pooley — voted for the proposal. Lord Mayor Clover Moore argued that with this arrangement council was "setting a responsible framework" for street distribution of publications.
Firth moved that the decision be deferred until the following council meeting to allow time for public discussion. "There are obviously real concerns in the community", she said, pointing to the dozen supporters of Green Left Weekly in the public gallery holding up "Defend free speech" placards. Harris noted that papers like GLW would not be able to afford the fees being offered by Nationwide News.
In a sign that SCC may try to use the MX deal to clamp down on the street distribution of other publications, the meeting noted that council is drafting a comprehensive policy to guide the "distribution of newspapers, other printed material and other commercial activities on footpaths". Further regulation is almost certainly going to mean more restrictions.
In an August 5 media release titled "Say No to Clover's Free Speech Tax", Lawrence Gibbons, publisher of the City Hub and City News newspapers, said the SCC "will become Australia's newest censorship board. Newspaper publishers, journalists, community activists and small business owners in the city must mobilise now before they lose the right to free speech on city streets once and for all. By attempting to regulate the distribution of paid newspapers like GLW and The Big Issue, Council could well be violating the implied constitutional right to freedom of speech concerning political issues upheld by Australia's High Court."
Green Left Weekly editor Kerryn Williams agrees. "While there is no indication yet that MX is to be given exclusive distribution rights, the council's approach so far sets a dangerous framework from the perspective of protecting free speech and stopping the commercialisation of public space", she said. "The ability to freely distribute printed material in public spaces, a basic democratic right, may now to be auctioned to the highest bidder and/or require specific council 'permission'. This would hit community and non-profit publications hard.
"Green Left Weekly is urging all those individuals and organisations who are also worried about this development to help build a public campaign for the unrestricted right of everyone to distribute material on city streets, free of charge. The streets belong to the people, and the council must not put the corporate media ahead of the public interest."
From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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